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Our Electrically-configured World Has Forced Us To Move From The Habit Of Data Classification To The Mode Of Pattern Recognition. We Can No Longer Build Serially, Block-by-block, Step-by-step, Because Instant Communication Insures That All Factors Of The Environment And Of Experience Co-exist In A State Of Active Interplay.

-Marshall McLuhan

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Our Electrically-configured World Has

Marshall McLuhan

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Our Electrically-configured World Has Forced Us To Move From The Habit Of Data Classification To The Mode Of Pattern Recognition. We Can No Longer Build Serially, Block-by-block, Step-by-step, Because Instant Communication Insures That All Factors Of The Environment And Of Experience Co-exist In A State Of Active Interplay.

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Television Is Teaching All The Time. Does More Educating Than The Schools And All The Institutions Of Higher Learning.

Moral Indignation Is A Technique Used To Endow The Idiot With Dignity.

The Space Of Early Greek Cosmology Was Structured By Logos - Resonant Utterance Or Word.

One Of The Effects Of Living With Electric Information Is That We Live Habitually In A State Of Information Overload. There's Always More Than You Can Cope With.

The Answers Are Always Inside The Problem, Not Outside.

Nothing Is Inevitable If We Are Willing To Contemplate What Is Happening.

All Media Are Extensions Of Some Human Faculty- Psychic Or Physical.

We Become What We Behold. We Shape Our Tools And Then Our Tools Shape Us.

Professionalism Merges The Individual Into Patterns Of Total Environment. Amateurism Seeks The Development Of The Total Awareness Of The Individual And The Critical Awareness Of The Groundrules Of Society. The Amateur Can Afford To Lose. The Professional Tends To Classify And Specialise, To Accept Uncritically The Groundrules Of The Environment. The Groundrules Provided By The Mass Response Of His Colleagues Serve As A Pervasive Environment Of Which He Is Contentedly Unaware. The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

A Successful Book Cannot Afford To Be More Than Ten Percent New.

Information And Images Bump Against Each Other Every Day In Massive Quantities, And The Resonance Of This Interfacing Is Like The Babble Of A Village Or Tavern Gossip Session.

Only A Fraction Of The History Of Literacy Has Been Typographic.

Einstein Pronounced The Doom Of Continuous Or 'rational' Space, And The Way Was Made Clear For Picasso And The Marx Brothers And Mad Magazine.

The Poet, The Artist, The Sleuth, Whoever Sharpens Our Perception Tends To Antisocial; Rarely 'well Adjusted,' He Cannot Go Along With Currents And Trends.

As A Rule, I Always Look For What Others Ignore.

Don't Ask Whether It Is Right Or Wrong. Instead Try To Find Out What Is Going On.

We Impose The Form Of The Old On The Content Of The New.

Today's Child Is Bewildered When He Enters The 19th Century Environment That Still Characterizes The Educational Establishment Where Information Is Scarce But Ordered And Structured By Fragmented, Classified Patterns Subjects, And Schedules.

Those Conspiracies That Are Too Incredible To Be Believed, Are By The Same Right, Those Which Most Often Succeed.

In Antiquity And The Middle Ages Reading Was Necessarily Reading Aloud.

It Is The Framework Which Changes With Each New Technology And Not Just The Picture Within The Frame.

Nowadays There Is No Conversation At All. Teachers Distrust Talk As Much As Business Men.

One Matter Englishmen Don't Think In The Least Funny Is Their Happy Consciousness Of Possessing A Deep Sense Of Humor.

A Typewriter Is A Means Of Transcribing Thought, Not Expressing It.

Violence Is The Quest For Identity. When Identity Disappears With Technological Innovation, Violence Is The Natural Recourse.

The Media Have Substituted Themselves For The Older World.

I Don't Want Them To Believe Me, I Just Want Them To Think.

Time’ Has Ceased, 'space' Has Vanished. We Now Live In A Global Village... A Simultaneous Happening

The Computer Is The Most Extraordinary Of Man's Technological Clothing; It's An Extension Of Our Central Nervous System. Beside It, The Wheel Is A Mere Hula-hoop.

We Drive Into The Future Using Only Our Rearview Mirror.

All Advertising Advertises Advertising.

Most Of Our Assumptions Have Outlived Their Uselessness.

Appetite Is Essentially Insatiable, And Where It Operates As A Criterion Of Both Action And Enjoyment (that Is, Everywhere In The Western World Since The Sixteenth Century) It Will Infallibly Discover Congenial Agencies (mechanical And Political) Of Expression.

First We Shape Our Tools, Thereafter They Shape Us

As The Unity Of The Modern World Becomes Increasingly A Technological Rather Than A Social Affair, The Techniques Of The Arts Provide The Most Valuable Means Of Insight Into The Real Direction Of Our Own Collective Purposes.

The Reader Is The Content Of Any Poem Or Of The Language He Employs, And In Order To Use Any Of These Forms, He Must Put Them On.

I Am Resolutely Opposed To All Innovation, All Change, But I Am Determined To Understand What’s Happening. Because I Don’t Choose Just To Sit And Let The Juggernaut Roll Over Me. Many People Seem To Think That If You Talk About Something Recent, You’re In Favor Of It. The Exact Opposite Is True In My Case. Anything I Talk About Is Almost Certainly Something I’m Resolutely Against. And It Seems To Me The Best Way To Oppose It Is To Understand It. And Then You Know Where To Turn Off The Buttons.

Art Is Anything You Can Get Away With.

The More The Data Banks Record About Each One Of Us, The Less We Exist.

If We Understand The Revolutionary Transformations Caused By New Media, We Can Anticipate And Control Them; But If We Continue In Our Self-induced Subliminal Trance, We Will Be Their Slaves.

When Two Seemingly Disparate Elements Are Imaginatively Poised Put In Apposition In New And Unique Ways, Startling Discoveries Often Result.

The Story Begins Only When The Book Closes.

Persons Grouped Around A Fire Or Candle For Warmth Or Light Are Less Able To Pursue Independent Thoughts, Or Even Tasks, Than People Supplied With Electric Light. In The Same Way, The Social And Educational Patterns Latent In Automation Are Those Of Self-employment And Artistic Autonomy.

... Their Power To See Environments As They Really Are.

Any Breakdown Is A Breakthrough.

The Laws Of The Media, In Tetrad Form, Bring Logos And Formal Cause Up To Date To Reveal Analytically The Structure Of All Human Artefacts.

The Medium Is The Message. This Is Merely To Say That The Personal And Social Consequences Of Any Medium - That Is, Of Any Extension Of Ourselves - Result From The New Scale That Is Introduced Into Our Affairs By Each Extension Of Ourselves, Or By Any New Technology.

If Men Were Able To Be Convinced That Art Is A Precise Advance Knowledge Of How To Cope With The Psychic And Social Consequences Of The Next Technology, Would They All Become Artist? Or Would They Begin A Careful Translation Of New Art Forms Into Social Navigation Charts? I Am Curious To Know What Would Happem If Art Were Suddenly Seen For What It Is, Namely, Exact Information Of How To Rearrange One's Psyche In Order To Anticipate The Next Blow From Our Own Extended Faculties.

Some Of My Fellow Academics Are Very Hostile, But I Sympathize With Them. They've Been Asleep For 500 Years And They Don't Like Anybody Who Comes Along And Stirs Them Up.

The Most Human Thing About Us Is Our Technology.

The Products Of Modern Science Are Not In Themselves Good Or Bad; It Is The Way They Are Used That Determines Their Value.

Man Works When He Is Partially Involved. When He Is Totally Involved He Is At Play Or Leisure.

The New Media Are Not Ways Of Relating To Us The 'real' World; They Are The Real World And They Reshape What Remains Of The Old World At Will.

Youth Instinctively Understand The Present Environment - The Electric Drama. It Lives Mythically And In Depth.

When Things Come At You Very Fast, Naturally You Lose Touch With Yourself.

During The Second War, The U.s.o. Sent Special Issues Of The Principal American Magazines To The Armed Forces, With The Ads Omitted. The Men Insisted On Having The Ads Back Again. Naturally. The Ads Are By Far The Best Part Of Any Magazine Or Newspaper. More Pains And Thought, More Wit And Art Go Into The Making Of An Ad Than Into Any Prose Feature Of Press Or Magazine. Ads Are News. What Is Wrong With Them Is That They Are Always Good News.

The Electric Age ... Established A Global Network That Has Much The Character Of Our Central Nervous System.

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The Only People Who Have Proof Of Their Sanity Are Those Who Have Been Discharged From Mental Institutions

Human Perception Is Literally Incarnation.

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We Have Be-come Irrevocably Involved With, And Responsible For, Each Other.

The Car Has Become The Carapace, The Protective And Aggressive Shell, Of Urban And Suburban Man.

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Until Writing Was Invented, Man Lived In Acoustic Space: Boundless, Directionless, Horizonless, In The Dark Of The Mind, In The World Of Emotion.

The Public Has Yet To See Tv As Tv. Broadcasters Have No Awareness Of Its Potential. The Movie People Are Just Beginning To Get A Grasp On Film.

In Television, Images Are Projected At You. You Are The Screen. The Images Wrap Around You. You Are The Vanishing Point.

"work" Does Not Exist In A Nonliterate World. The Primitive Hunter Or Fisherman Did No Work, Any More Than Does The Poet, Painter, Or Thinker Of Today. Where The Whole Man Is Involved There Is No Work.

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The Literate Man Is A Sucker For Propaganda...you Cannot Propagandize A Native. You Can Sell Him Rum And Trinkets, But You Cannot Sell Him Ideas.

Today The Tyrant Rules Not By Club Or Fist, But Disguised As A Market Researcher, He Shepherds His Flocks In The Ways Of Utility And Comfort.

The Alphabet And Print Technology Fostered And Encouraged A Fragmenting Process, A Process Of Specialism And Detachment. Electric Technology Fosters And Encourages Unification And Involvement.

You Can Be A French Canadian Or An English Canadian, But Not A Canadian. We Know How To Live Without An Identity, And This Is One Of Our Marvellous Resources.

If People Were Able To Be Convinced That Art Is Precise Advance Knowledge Of How To Cope With The Psychic And Social Consequences Of The Next Technology, Would They All Become Artists?

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The Meaning Of Experience Is Typically One Generation Behind The Experience. The Content Of New Situations, Both Private And Corporate, Is Typically The Preceding Situation.

When People Become Too Intense, Too Serious, They Will Have Trouble In Relating To Any Sort Of Social Game Or Norm. Perhaps This Is Why Jokes Are So Important. On One Hand They Tell Us About Where The Problems And Grievances Are, And, At The Same Time, They Provide The Means Of Enduring These Grievances By Laughing At The Problems.

The Logos Of Creation, 'and God Said ...' Formed The Basis Of Christian Interpretation Of The 'book Of Nature.

Publication Is A Self-invasion Of Privacy.

Once You See The Boundaries Of Your Environment, They Are No Longer The Boundaries Of Your Environment.

The Age Of Automation Is Going To Be The Age Of "do It Yourself".

Characteristics

There Is A Real, Living Unity In Our Time, As In Any Other, But It Lies Submerged Under A Superficial Hubbub Of Sensation.

The Artist Is The Man In Any Field, Scientific Or Humanistic, Who Grasps The Implications Of His Actions And Of New Knowledge In His Own Time. He Is The Man Of Integral Awareness.

Affluence Creates Poverty.

The Medium, Or Process, Of Our Time - Electric Technology Is Reshaping And Restructuring Patterns Of Social Interdependence And Every Aspect Of Our Personal Life. It Is Forcing Us To Reconsider And Re-evaluate Practically Every Thought, Every Action.

Language Does For Intelligence What The Wheel Does For The Feet And The Body. It Enables Them To Move From Thing To Thing With Greater Ease And Speed And Ever Less Involvement.

Character No Longer Is Shaped By Only Two Earnest, Fumbling Experts. Now All The World's A Sage.

It Is Possible To Deal With The Entire Environment As A Work Of Art.

A Moral Point Of View Too Often Serves As A Substitute For Understanding In Technological Matters.

The Suddenness Of The Leap From Hardware To Software Cannot But Produce A Period Of Anarchy And Collapse, Especially In The Developed Countries.

The Percept Takes Priority Of The Concept.

Ideally, Advertising Aims At The Goal Of A Programmed Harmony Among All Human Impulses And Aspirations And Endeavors. Using Handicraft Methods, It Stretches Out Toward The Ultimate Electronic Goal Of A Collective Consciousness.

American Youth Attributes Much More Importance To Arriving At Driver's License Age Than At Voting Age.

One Main Condition Of Aristocratic Life Was Present In The South And Not In The North--personal Responsibility To Other Human Beings For Education And Material Welfare. (a Carnegie Or A Ford, Like A Bureaucracy, Molds The Lives Of Millions Without Taking Any Responsibility.)

I Am Not A "culture Critic" Because I Am Not In Any Way Interested In Classifying Cultural Forms. I Am A Metaphysician, Interested In The Life Of The Forms And Their Surprising Modalities. That Is Why I Have No Interest In The Academic World.

Our Permanent Address Is Tommorrow.

The Movie, By Sheer Speeding Up Of The Mechanical, Carried Us From The World Of Sequence And Connections Into The World Of Creative Configurations And Structure.

Metaphor Has Traditionally Been Regarded As The Matrix And Pattern Of The Figures Of Speech.

We Don't Know Who Discovered Water, But We Know It Wasn't The Fish.

I'm Not Sure Who Discovered Water, But I'm Pretty Sure It Wasn't A Fish.

Scribal Culture And Gothic Architecture Were Both Concerned With Light Through, Not Light On.

The Spoken Word Was The First Technology By Which Man Was Able To Let Go Of His Environment In Order To Grasp It In A New Way.

People Hope That If They Scream Loudly Enough About "values" Then Others Will Mistake Them For Serious, Sensitive Souls Who Have Higher And Nobler Perceptions Than Ordinary People. Otherwise, Why Would They Be Screaming? Moral Bitterness Is A Basic Technique For Endowing The Idiot With Dignity.

A New Medium Is Never An Addition To An Old One, Nor Does It Leave The Old One In Peace. It Never Ceases To Oppress The Older Media Until It Finds New Shapes And Positions For Them.

Language As The Technology Of Human Extension, Whose Powers Of Division And Separation We Know So Well, May Have Been The "tower Of Babel" By Which Men Sought To Scale The Highest Heavens. Today Computers Hold Out The Promise Of A Means Of Instant Tr

The Visual Power Of The Phonetic Alphabet Is The Translate Other Languages Into Itself Is Part Of Its Power To Invade Right Hemisphere (oral) Cultures.

I Am Curious To Know What Would Happen If Art Were Suddenly Seen For What It Is, Namely, Exact Information Of How To Rearrange One's Psyche In Order To Anticipate The Next Blow From Our Own Extended Faculties.

Historians And Archaeologists Will One Day Discover That The Ads Of Our Time Are The Richest And Most Faithful Reflections That Any Society Ever Made Of Its Entire Range Of Activities.

Everybody Experiences Far More Than He Understands. Yet It Is Experience, Rather Than Understanding, That Influences Behavior.

The Alphabet Was One Thing When Applied To Clay Or Stone, And Quite Another When Set Down On Light Papyrus.

The Circuited City Of The Future Will Not Be The Huge Hunk Of Concentrated Real Estate Created By The Railway. It Will Take On A Totally New Meaning Under Conditions Of Very Rapid Movement. It Will Be An Information Megalopolis.

The Ordinary Person Senses The Greatness Of The Odds Against Him Even Without Thought Or Analysis, And He Adapts His Attitudes Unconsciously. A Huge Passivity Has Settled On Industrial Society. For People Carried About In Mechanical Vehicles, Earning Their Living By Waiting On Machines, Listening Much Of The Waking Day To Canned Music, Watching Packaged Movie Entertainment And Capsulated News, For Such People It Would Require An Exceptional Degree Of Awareness And An Especial Heroism Of Effort To Be Anything But Supine Consumers Of Processed Goods.

Every Innovation Scraps Its Immediate Predecessor And Retrieves Still Older Figures – It Causes Floods Of Antiques Or Nostalgic Art Forms And Stimulates The Search For Museum Pieces.

The Content Or Message Of Any Particular Medium Has About As Much Importance As The Stenciling On The Casing Of An Atomic Bomb.

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically, But We Continue To Think Fragmentarily, And On Single, Separate Planes.

When New Technologies Impose Themselves On Societies Long Habituated To Older Technologies, Anxieties Of All Kinds Result.

In This Electronic Age We See Ourselves Being Translated More And More Into The Form Of Information, Moving Toward The Technological Extension Of Consciousness.

The Content Or Time-clothing Of Any Medium Or Culture Is The Preceding Medium Or Culture.

Language Always Preserves A Play Or Figure/ground Relation Between Experience, And Perception And Its Replay In Expression.

The School System Is The Homogenizing Hopper Into Which We Toss Our Integral Tots For Processing.

Where The Whole Man Is Involved There Is No Work. Work Begins With The Division Of Labor.

Division Of Labor

Education, Which Should Be Helping Youth To Understand And Adapt To Their Revolutionary New Environments, Is Instead Being Used Merely As An Instrument Of Cultural Aggression.

The Artist Is The Person Who Invents The Means To Bridge Between Biological Inheritance And The Environments Created By Technological Innovation.

The Future Of Work Consists Of Learning A Living.

Innumerable Confusions And A Feeling Of Despair Invariably Emerge In Periods Of Great Technological And Cultural Transition.

Once Introduced Discontinuity, Once Challenge Any Of The Properties Of Visual Space, And As They Flow From Each Other, The Whole Conceptual Framework Collapses.

I May Be Wrong, But I'm Never In Doubt.

Mass Man Is A Phenomenon Of Electric Speed, Not Of Physical Quantity.

Even Mud Gives The Illusion Of Depth.

There Is Absolutely No Inevitability, So Long As There Is A Willingness To Contemplate What Is Happening.

Today's Child Is Growing Up Absurd, Because He Lives In Two Worlds, And Neither Of Them Inclines Him To Grow Up. Growing Up--thatis Our New Work, And It Is Total. Mere Instruction Will Not Suffice.

The Task Confronting Contemporary Man Is To Live With The Hidden Ground Of His Activities As Familiarly As Our Literate Predecessors Lived With The Figure Minus Ground.

When Producers Want To Know What The Public Wants, They Graph It As Curves. When They Want To Tell The Public What To Get, They Say It In Curves.

While Poe And The Symbolists Were Exploring The Irrational In Literature, Freud Had Begun To Explore The Resonant Figure/ground Double-plot Of The Conscious And Unconscious.

On Spaceship Earth There Are No Passengers; Everybody Is A Member Of The Crew. We Have Moved Into An Age In Which Everybody's Activities Affect Everybody Else.

The Family Circle Has Widened. The Worldpool Of Information Fathered By The Electric Media--movies, Telstar, Flight--far Surpassesany Possible Influence Mom And Dad Can Now Bring To Bear. Character No Longer Is Shaped By Only Two Earnest, Fumbling Experts. Now All The World's A Sage.

The Only Way To Recover The Old World Is To Induce The Media Into Vomiting It Back Up.

The Global Village Is A Place Of Very Arduous Interfaces And Very Abrasive Situations.

The Method Of Our Time Is To Use Not A Single But Multiple Models For Exploration.

At Electric Speed, All Forms Are Pushed To The Limits Of Their Potential.

The Copy Of An Ad Is Merely A Punning Gag To Distract The Critical Faculties While The Image Of The Product Goes To Work On The Hypnotized Viewer. Those Who Have Spent Their Lives Protesting About 'false And Misleading Ad Copy' Are Godsends To Advertisers, As Teetotalers Are To Brewers, And Moral Censors Are To Books And Films. The Protesters Are The Best Acclaimers And Accelerators. Since The Advent Of Pictures, The Job Of The Ad Copy Is As Incidental And Latent As The 'meaning' Of A Poem Is To A Poem, Or The Words Of A Song Are To A Song.

The Huge Advantage Of Canada Is Its Backwardness.

Nobody Can Commit Photography Alone.

New Media May At First Appear As Mere Codes Of Transmission For Older Achievement And Established Patterns Of Thought. But Nobody Could Make The Mistake Of Supposing That Phonetic Writing Merely Made It Possible For The Greeks To Set Down In Visual Order What They Had Though And Known Before Writing. In The Same Way Printing Made Literature Possible. It Did Not Merely Encode Literature.

Today, The Mass Audience (the Successor To The "public") Can Be Used As A Creative, Participating Force. It Is, Instead, Merely Given Packages Of Passive Entertainment. Politics Offers Yesterday's Answers To Today's Questions.

Everybody Tends To Merge His Identity With Other People At The Speed Of Light. It's Called Being Mass Man.

What Goes On Inside The School Is An Interruption Of Education.

Television Brought The Brutality Of War Into The Comfort Of The Living Room. Vietnam Was Lost In The Living Rooms Of America - Not On The Battlefields Of Vietnam.

The Mother Tongue Is Propaganda.

Politics Offers Yesterday's Answers To Today's Problems.

Our Age Of Anxiety Is, In Great Part, The Result Of Trying To Do Today's Job With Yesterday's Tools And Yesterday's Concepts.

I Don't Necessarily Agree With Everything I Say.

Technology Is That Which Separates Us From Our Environment.

There Are Many People For Whom 'thinking' Necessarily Means Identifying With Existing Trends.

Great Art Speaks A Language Which Every Intelligent Person Can Understand. The People Who Call Themselves Modernists Today Speak A Different Language.

It Is Critical Vision Alone Which Can Mitigate The Unimpeded Operation Of The Automatic.

Education Is Civil Defence Against Media Fallout.

Our Motor Car Is Our Supreme Form Of Privacy When We Are Away From Home.

A Commercial Society Whose Members Are Essentially Ascetic And Indifferent In Social Ritual Has To Be Provided With Blueprints And Specifications For Evoking The Right Tone For Every Occasion.

The Movie Stars And Matinee Idols Are Put Into The Public Domain By Photography. They Become Dreams That Money Can Buy. They Can Be Bought And Thumbed More Easily Than Public Prostitutes.

All Meaning Alters With Acceleration, Because All Patterns Of Personal And Political Interdependence Change With Any Acceleration Of Information.

Why Is It So Easy To Acquire The Solutions Of Past Problems And So Difficult To Solve Current Ones

Only The Vanquished Remember History.

Life. Consider The Alternative.

The 'content' Of Any Medium Is Always Another Medium.

All Forms Of Violence Are Quests For Identity. When You Live On The Frontier, You Have No Identity. You're A Nobody.

Politics Will Eventually Be Replaced By Imagery. The Politician Will Be Only Too Happy To Abdicate In Favor Of His Image, Because The Image Will Be So Much More Powerful Than He Could Ever Be.

The Tribalizing Power Of The New Electronic Media, The Way In Which They Return To Us To The Unified Fields Of The Old Oral Cultures, To Tribal Cohesion And Pre-individualist Patterns Of Thought, Is Little Understood. Tribalism Is The Sense Of The Deep Bond Of Family, The Closed Society As The Norm Of Community.

For Tribal Man, Space Was The Uncontrollable Mystery. For Technological Man It Is Time That Occupies The Same Role.

Relativity Theory Forced The Abandonment, In Principle, Of Absolute Space And Absolute Time.

It Has Always Been The Artist Who Realizes That The Future Is The Present And Uses His Work To Prepare The Grounds For It

The Car Has Become An Article Of Dress Without Which We Feel Uncertain, Unclad, And Incomplete In The Urban Compound.

By Phonemic Trans-formation Into Visual Terms, The Alphabet Became A Universal, Abstract, Static Container Of Meaningless Sounds.

Tv Acting Is So Extremely Intimate, Because Of The Peculiar Involvement Of The Viewer With The Completion Or "closing" Of The Tv Image, That The Actor Must Achieve A Great Degree Of Spontaneous Casualness That Would Be Irrelevant In Movie And Lost On The Stage. For The Audience Participates In The Inner Life Of The Tv Actor As Fully As In The Outer Life Of The Movie Star. Technically, Tv Tends To Be A Close-up Medium. The Close-up That In The Movie Is Used For Shock Is, On Tv, A Quite Casual Thing.

Money Is A Poor Man's Credit Card.

The Modern Little Red Riding Hood, Reared On Singing Commercials, Has No Objection To Being Eaten By The Wolf.

Advertising Business

In An Age Of Multiple And Massive Innovations, Obsolescence Becomes The Major Obsession.

It's Misleading To Suppose There's Any Basic Difference Between Education & Entertainment. This Distinction Merely Relieves People Of The Responsibility Of Looking Into The Matter.

Professionalism Is Environmental. Amateurism Is Anti Environmental. Professionalism Merges The Individual Into Patterns Of Total Environment. Amateurism Seeks The Development Of The Total Awareness Of The Individual And The Critical Awareness Of The Ground Rules Of Society. The Amateur Can Afford To Loose.

The Medium Is The Message" Because It Is The Medium That Shapes And Controls The Search And Form Of Human Associations And Action.

The Genteel Is A Mighty Catafalque Of Service-with-a-smile And Flattering Solicitude Smothering Every Spontaneous Movement Of Thought Or Feeling.

Anyone Who Tries To Make A Distinction Between Education And Entertainment Doesn't Know The First Thing About Either.

I've Always Been Careful Never To Predict Anything That Had Not Already Happened.

New Media Are New Archetypes, At First Disguised As Degradations Of Older Media.

First We Build The Tools, Then They Build Us.

Mass Transportation Is Doomed To Failure In North America Because A Person's Car Is The Only Place Where He Can Be Alone And Think.

The Subliminal Depths Of Radio Are Charged With The Resonating Echoes Of Tribal Horns And Antique Drums. This Is Inherent In The Very Nature Of This Medium, With Its Power To Turn The Psyche And Society Into A Single Echo Chamber.

To Say That "the Camera Cannot Lie" Is Merely To Underline The Multiple Deceits That Are Now Practised In Its Name.

[cameras] Tend To Turn People Into Things And The Photograph Extends And Multiplies The Human Image To The Proportions Of Mass-produced Merchandise And, [in The Age Of Photography] The World Itself Becomes A Sort Of Museum Of Objects That Have Been Encountered Before In Some Other Museum And To Say That The Camera Cannot Lie Is Merely To Underline The Multiple Deceits That Are Now Practiced In Its Name.

The Business Of Art Is No Longer The Communication Of Thoughts Or Feelings Which Are To Be Conceptually Ordered, But A Direct Participation In An Experience. The Whole Tendency Of Modern Communication...is Towards Participation In A Process, Rather Than Apprehension Of Concepts.

It Is Always The Psychic And Social Grounds, Brought Into Play By Each Medium Or Technology, That Readjust The Balance Of The Hemispheres And Of Human Sensibilities Into Equilibrium With Those Grounds.

Canada Is The Only Country In The World That Knows How To Live Without An Identity.

There Is No Individualism In Eastern Or Oral Cultures.

If The Work Of The City Is The Remaking Or Translating Of Man Into A More Suitable Form Than His Nomadic Ancestors Achieved, Then Might Not Our Current Translation Of Our Entire Lives Into The Spiritual Form Of Information Seem To Make Of The Entire.

Once We Have Surrendered Our Senses And Nervous Systems To The Private Manipulation Of Those Who Would Try To Benefit From Taking A Lease On Our Eyes And Ears And Nerves, We Don't Really Have Any Rights Left. Leasing Our Eyes And Ears And Nerves To Commercial Interests Is Like Handing Over The Common Speech To A Private Corporation, Or Like Giving The Earth's Atmosphere To A Company As A Monopoly.

My Main Theme Is The Extension Of The Nervous System In The Electric Age, And Thus, The Complete Break With Five Thousand Years Of Mechanical Technology. This I State Over And Over Again. I Do Not Say Whether It Is A Good Or Bad Thing. To Do So Would Be Meaningless And Arrogant.

All Media Work Us Over Completely. They Are So Pervasive In Their Personal, Political, Economic, Aesthetic, Psychological, Moral, Ethical, And Social Consequences That They Leave No Part Of Us Untouched, Unaffected, Unaltered. The Medium Is The Message. Any Understanding Of Social And Cultural Change Is Impossible Without A Knowledge Of The Way Media Work As Environments. All Media Are Extensions Of Some Human Faculty - Psychic Or Physical.

With The Arrival Of Electric Technology, Man Extended, Or Set Outside Himself, A Live Model Of The Central Nervous System Itself. To The Degree That This Is So, It Is A Development That Suggests A Desperate And Suicidal Autoamputation, As If The Central Nervous System Could No Longer Depend On The Physical Organs To Be Protective Buffers Against The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Mechanism.

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